Word: conductor
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...Conductor William Steinberg is a threat to American musical tradition. For one thing, he is downright chummy with his Pittsburgh Symphony musicians. For another, he blatantly delights in performing "the music nobody wants to play, nobody wants to conduct and nobody wants to hear." The traditional image of the success ful symphony conductor is a shaggy-haired despot who rules with an iron fist and remains disdainfully aloof at all times. But Steinberg treats his musicians with courtesy and respect, regales them with a rich sense of humor, rides in the bus with them on tour, and preaches such heresies...
...beginning, Soprano Leontyne Price sounds outsized, more like Lilith than a simple gypsy, but the opera soon rises to her voltage. Tenor Franco Corelli manages a convincing disintegration as Don Jose, and Baritone Robert Merrill's Escamillo exudes male vanity. Mirella Freni makes a sweet-voiced Micaela. Conductor Herbert von Karajan colors the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra sensuously, generally keeping the tempos down and the temperature up; the smugglers' quintet reaches a high pitch of excitement...
...were working on in New City, N.Y., when Weill died of a heart attack at the age of 50. The five songs Weill completed for Huckleberry were locked away and all but forgotten for 14 years. Finally, Lys Symonette, Weill's former secretary and rehearsal pianist, and Broadway Conductor Milton Rosenstock resurrected the musical remains of Huckleberry, with the idea of molding it into a half-hour TV show. Several U.S. producers turned down the idea, so this spring Mrs. Symonette approached Heinz Scheiderbauer, Vienna's leading independent TV film maker, who leaped at the proposition. Rosenstock took...
...only Indian conductor who has ever won international fame, Mehta allows that he was "brainwashed with classical music from the cradle." Urged on by his father, former conductor of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra and now a violinist with Philadelphia's Curtis String Quartet, he began studying the violin and piano at seven. At one period, he renounced music for medicine but soon relented. "Every time I sat down to write an exam or cut up a dogfish," he says, "there I was with a Brahms symphony running through my head." In 1958, after studying conducting for three years...
Misfortune's Child. Mehta's big chance came during a whirlwind nine-month period in 1960-61 when half the world's first-rank conductors were struck with illness. Hopscotching between continents on a moment's notice, he became the leading understudy to a host of ailing maestros, winning high critical acclaim nearly everywhere he appeared. In 1961, after stellar subbing jobs in Los Angeles and Montreal, Mehta was named resident conductor with both cities' orchestras. At 24, he rejuvenated Montreal's faltering orchestra almost overnight, stretched its season from twelve to 26 weeks...